Correspondence. (1911)

 Letter to the Editors from the March 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

A. E. Hester writes :

(1) Production under your system must be international, obviously therefore each country will be interdependent upon the ether. They must, then, agree to sustain each other in food, clothing, etc. Is this possible?

(2) How could each get the full value of his labour?

(3) The natural wealth of some countries is greater than others, who could not produce on equal terms.

(4) If Production is to be national, then Socialism is impossible and not worth consideration.

____________________________________

(1) Even under capitalism countries are interdependent, and, in a sense, “sustain each other in food, clothing, etc.” Hence your query “Is this possible ?” is answered in the affirmative by the facts around you to-day.

(2) No Socialist says that “each man will get the full value of his labour,” for the simple reason that, as the Socialist is always pointing out, production under Socialism will be social—as, indeed, it is to-day—and no man can say exactly what is the value contributes.

What the Socialist says is that the working class is the only section of society engaged in wealth production, and therefore the working class, collectively, should own the results of its applied energy.

(3) No one country has greater natural advantages in every direction than another. Some have the advantage in one way, some in another. And, as the development of International trade has shown, these advantages, or their results, are being exchanged in increasing quantities.

(4) The most elementary examination of present day trade shows that production is growing more international year by year. Raw materials from one part of the globe are worked up in another ; goods partly manufactured in one country are finished in another, and so on. Your query, therefore, has no basis in fact.

Jack Fitzgerald

Letter: Three questions (1975)

Letter to the Editors from the March 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Three questions

Since the late ’forties when I listened to Socialist policy and principles at Lincoln’s Inn Fields or at Hyde Park Corner, I have considered the propositions of the SPGB. I find myself in agreement with the political theory you set forth, but there are three points which I have never been able to resolve.

The hypothetical situation of a Socialist party coming in as an administration in any country in which you have a connection would mean that it would, as a Socialist entity, probably find itself alone in a capitalist world. Would not the maxim of Lenin that “socialism is impossible to sustain in one country alone” apply? (I agree that Lenin’s conception of Socialism was erroneous but the doctrine would, I think, just as truly apply to any of your sister parties.)

As I understand the Socialist position there would be no police or law-enforcement body in a Socialist society. It is agreed that most crime stems from existence in a capitalist society, but I cannot think that all crime would disappear under Socialism. Rape, for example, would probably exist in any society. How does one deal with violent anti-social acts which, so far as one can tell, are not the product of capitalism?

I cannot accept that Socialism and religion are incompatible. True, the way in which the capitalist establishment uses religion for its own ends obscures the issue and prolongs the coming of Socialism, but it seems to me that contemplation of the possibility or otherwise of a life after death is purely a matter for the individual, and to insist that one’s opinions in this matter should be declared before being considered as a member of the SPGB appears high-handed if not dictatorial. After all, if one were regularly to consult a psychiatrist (for which, for many people, religion is a substitute), would this too preclude membership?

E. Morley 

London S.E.5.

Reply

For convenience we have numbered our correspondent’s questions. The replies are:

1. Socialism will be world-wide because the system it will replace is itself world-wide. The establishment of Socialism in one country alone is impossible because the means of production are operated throughout the globe. You appear to assume that political ideas cannot cross political boundaries. This is not so. Even in the nineteenth century when communications were much slower and more laborious than today, ideas spread very quickly. Even repression and censorship by the ruling class could not prevent ideas spreading. Remember that 1848 was called “the year of revolutions” when uprisings occurred all over Europe. Indeed, there was an often-quoted saying which sums this up admirably — “When France sneezes, Europe catches a cold”.

2. See the reply to another correspondent on the “problem” of crime.

3. Socialism and religion are incompatible. The former explains man’s development and his social relations in material terms which we can verify. Religion on the other hand “explains” the world by reference to the existence of an unprovable entity, i.e. God. The belief in a possibility of life after death is a soporific which prevents the action that is urgently needed to solve present- day problems being taken now.

4. Undergoing psychiatric treatment is no more a bar to membership of the Socialist Party than is undergoing treatment for corns.

Editors.

Human behaviour (2002)

Book Review from the March 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect’. By Paul R. Ehrlich. Island Press.

This is the same Paul Ehrlich who, thirty years ago, irritated Socialists by his shrill claims that it was “overpopulation”, rather than capitalism’s production for profit, that caused environmental deterioration and other ecological problems. However this, his latest book, will go a long way to restoring his reputation.

He sets out his intention without ambiguity in the preface. It is to refute

“the erroneous notion that people possess a common set of rigid, genetically specified behavioral predilections that are unlikely to be altered by circumstances. ‘After all’, we’re often told, ‘you can’t change human nature’. The notion that there is one such nature to change allows us to be painted in the popular mind as instinctively aggressive, greedy, selfish, duplicitous, sex-crazed, cruel, and generally brutish creatures with a veneer of social responsibility. Our better selves are seen to be in constant battle with a universal set of unchanging, primitives ‘drives’, which frequently break through the veneer and create many of the serious ills that afflict humanity. It is a view as dismal as it is wrong, considering what is actually known about our behavior”.

The basic answer he gives to the “human nature argument” is that there is no such thing as a single, unchanging human nature but, insofar as behaviour is the public display of our nature, there are and have been many different human natures (hence the book’s title) which change over time. This is a different approach from ours which distinguishes between a more or less unchanging biologically-determined human nature and human behaviour which is socially and culturally determined and which can, has and does vary depending on the type of society people were brought up in or live in. But this is essentially only a different of terminology to arrive at the same conclusion that our behaviour is not narrowly determined by our genes but that, on the contrary, one of our biologically-inherited characteristics is precisely the capacity, as a species, for behavioral flexibility and adaptability.

Ehrlich sets out the current state of scientific understanding of the issue which confirms that our behaviour is predominantly determined not by our genes but by our cultures (“socially transmitted behaviors, beliefs, institutions, arts, and so on”). Culture is transmitted by non-genetic means, basically by learning (which assumes of course a genetically-inherited capacity to learn), and is different at different times and in different places. Hence the great variety of behaviors exhibited by humans. Such complicated and changing behaviours, says Ehrlich, could not possibly be governed by our genes since aren’t enough of them. Writing before the first results of the human genome project Ehrlich quotes a figure of 100,000 for the number of human genes. The human genome project suggests a figure less than half this, so reinforcing Ehrlich’s “gene shortage” shortage argument against biological determinism.

Ehrlich writes as a member of the American school of “cultural evolutionists” which is not too far from Marx’s materialist conception of history. In fact, he refers at one point to “the great political economist Karl Marx”. He also takes a materialist approach to the mind: “consciousness, thinking, reasoning – activities of the ‘mind’ – are all centred in the brain and are phenomena as natural (and as material) as the legs’ actions of standing, walking, running, and kicking”.

So, a very useful book, even if Ehrlich does ramble on a bit in the last few chapters.

Adam Buick

Correspondence: An end to all markets (1962)

Letter to the Editors from the March 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

An end to all markets

Thank you for sending me your pamphlet. You say that ‘what is required is not a trust in leaders . . . but an attitude of self reliance and a determination to understand the nature of the problems themselves’.

What is so remarkable is that you yourselves do not appear to understand the nature of the problem. We do not live in a system of society which is capitalist. This may have been true in the middle ages, when the merchant adventurers, who amassed huge fortunes under the trade guild monopolies “invested” i,e, spent their wealth in fitting out fleets to trade with countries abroad. The object of capitalism is to use the means of production profitably.

There is very little indication that a profitable use has been made of capital (the means of production). If in fact its use had resulted in profit, there would have been no debt, but profit, no need for subsidies, but a prosperous industry, no idle resources and no vast quantities of unsold wealth. Lord Glanesk is reported to have said that his firm, in tendering for the construction of a new liner for the Atlantic service, had no hope of earning a profit, but were merely concerned with keeping their men in employment. Mr. Campbell, the largest wheat producer in the U.S. admitted that he had three thousand million dollars worth of unsaleable wheat on his hands. It is obvious that the so-called ‘capitalists’ are only the nominal owners of the land and factories which they are alleged to own, but which in fact are pledged as security for loans, overdrafts and the issue of securities to banks, insurance offices and investment trusts.

You say that the aim of the S.P.G.B. is to replace this system by one in which the ownership would be vested in the community. It is inconceivable to me that anyone could believe that the community could own anything. All that happens is that they are permitted to use the means of production and exchange at the discretion of Government officials who, experience has shown, are more tyrannical, more dilatory and less efficient than anyone else. Of all monopolies, a monopoly vested in the government is more onerous to the community and more difficult to get rid of.

You propose to ‘bring to an end the present competition for markets’. But competition is the only safeguard for the consumer. A market in a commodity is formed by people wanting something and having the money to buy it. If the consumer has no choice, but is forced to have whatever the monopoly produces, the market is restricted: the consumer does not get what he wants, but what he has to put up with.

If under Socialism goods are produced ‘solely for the use of mankind’, how are yon to know what sort of things the public have a use for. You only know what people want after they have bought it. People don’t want what a government official thinks are of use to them, they like many useless things as well as necessities. You say that all persons would have ‘free access’ to the things they needed; but if all that people had to do was to walk into a shop and ask for what they wanted in order to get it, there would soon be long queues outside the shops and nobody in the factories.

Under Socialism, you say, ‘all forms of profit would disappear’.

But it is perfectly legitimate for the worker to profit from his work. The difference between the worker and his employer is that the worker only has to work. The employer has to see that he works (and as nobody likes work, this entails a lot of supervision), secondly he has to provide the means (the plant, machinery and materials) and thirdly to foresee the sort of work people will want done in the future. There is all the difference in the world between profiting from work (industry) which the community wants done (because they pay for it), and profiting from usury by receiving rent and interest for the use of the means of production. Investment to a business means spending money—on wages and salaries—which if spent mean a profit. The wage or salary of the worker is just, as much profit from work, as the profit of the employer is his wage or salary.

Investment to a usurer means lending money. If he saves the money to lend, he robs the workers of an income, because only by spending money can any one earn an income. If he creates the money (as do the banks and insurance offices) he robs the worker of his profit either by inflating the currency, thus raising prices, or by charging interest which is added to the price.

To suggest that man in his present stage of development can be trusted to give of his best, and only take what he needs is totally unrelated to human experience. Man is by nature lazy, selfish, greedy and cruel. In dealing with human nature at its present stage of development it is necessary to insist that men depend for their livelihood on pleasing others. In this way. greed, laziness and selfishness can only be indulged by first gratifying the tastes and needs of others.

Leslie Wilson, 

Wallington, Surrey

Reply

We agree that the object of capitalist production is to use the means of production profitably; but Mr. Wilson does not add that this profit is reserved for the capitalists who own industry and the other means of production and distribution. Some capitalist concerns fail to make a profit, others fall into debt or are propped up by enormous government subsidies. Some, like the, shipyard which tendered for the proposed new Cunarder, may deliberately incur a loss as the cost of staying in production with the hope of making a profit later on. None of this alters the fact that we live in a capitalist society in which the object of production is profit. Some firms, after all, are highly profitable; ICI, for example, made £80 millions during 1960. It is true that no capitalist can be sure that he is always going to make a profit or even remain solvent; that is an aspect of the anarchy of capitalism. It is why some companies make a profit and others make a loss, why some ride high in a boom and others go under in a slump.

The capitalist often has to pay off overdrafts, loans and so on but this does not affect his situation as an owner of the means of production. He pays off his financial commitments from the profit which comes to him because he owns a factory, a mine or something similar.

Mr. Wilson’s remarks about government officials and state monopolies may or may not be true. Neither of these have anything to do with Socialism, in which the oppressive State organisation will not exist.

Competition may sometimes offer some slight advantages to a consumer. But it can also be wasteful; it is the reason for armies of salesmen chasing each other over the same ground and for a lot more wasted effort. And in the international field competition for markets and the like leads to war. In any case, for the working class the market is always restricted because the limits of their wages mean that they rarely get what they would really like but usually have to put up with what they can afford, be it ever so cheap and nasty.

No government official—or for that matter no market research expert—will decide what wealth will be produced under Socialism. These people are tied to commercial motives and considerations. Set free of such restrictions, society itself will know what it needs and wants and so will decide the matter itself. Queues are the result of shortage, of people being afraid that they will not get something they need and having to wait a long time for it. But Socialism will be a system not only of free access but of plenty, in which there will be no need for the queue or for any of the other symbols of capitalism’s crises of shortage.

The employer does not need to exert himself very much to see that his workers work. Apart from the fact that he employs managers and foremen to see to such things, a worker is forced to get a job because that is his only means of living. He cannot make profit from his wage because it is generally only about sufficient to reproduce him as a worker, which leaves no margin for profit. On the other hand, the employers’ profit conies from the surplus which the worker produces over the value of his wage and the other capital which has been consumed in production. The difference between this profit and the worker’s wage can be seen in the fact that the capitalist does not have to work for his profit. He only needs to have shares in a factory, railway and so on.

Some human behaviour may be as bad as Mr. Wilson thinks. Other human behaviour is heroic, sacrificial and considerate. In fact, it is widely fashioned by the conditions in which men find themselves. Socialism will offer the world peace, plenty and happiness. Men’s behaviour will reflect the fact.

Editorial Committee

The cost of money (2026)

From the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

A musical ensemble undergoing a restructuring has formed a small committee to consider the details. An important factor was the membership fee. Although the musicians were all amateurs, in the best sense of that word, there were regular costs to be met. This meant that while the fees were not exorbitant, none the less they were significant. This raised an issue: an aim of the ensemble was to encourage players of various abilities to participate, including those whose financial circumstances would make the fees prohibitively expensive.

The simple solution was to accept that individual circumstances could be taken into consideration, with fees reduced or waived. One committee member, in particular, was enthusiastic in his support of this arrangement, declaring, ‘As a socialist I’m all in favour.’ He was an active member of the Labour Party, obviously mistaking a commendable act of social altruism as an expression of socialism. Indeed, it could appear to conform with the socialist maxim, from each according to ability, to each according to need.

However, while individual needs in this specific context were to be met, the ability referred to in this instance was the ability to pay, not play. A skilled musician’s opportunity to play would depend on a financial arrangement. If at some future time expenses were such that an accommodation of non-fee payers was no longer sustainable by the ensemble then the concession could be withdrawn. The player’s desire and ability to play would still exist, but would be denied.

The determining factor, money, remains decisive in straightened circumstances. The ensemble’s proposed inclusive action is an example of solidarity, again giving the lie to the oft-voiced opinion that human nature is greedy and selfish. There is no requirement for the ensemble to be so considerate as there are a goodly number of members already. It has grown over the decade of its existence and continues to grow. It is now looking to develop a youth section if that can be funded. Back to money again as the crucial factor before the needs and abilities of young people can be identified and met.

The ensemble meets weekly to develop its skills and programme of public performances. The individual musicians devote a significant portion of their time to daily practice at home. In other words they work hard, but entirely unremunerated. Another refutation of the seemingly ‘common sense’ argument that people will not work unless paid. Rather, they pay to work.

This is but one example of what is happening across society, people working voluntarily in a wide range of circumstances, already freely giving of their abilities to fulfil needs both personal and communal.

A moment’s consideration should enable most people to think of those they know and circumstances where they come across volunteers. If all volunteers withdrew their efforts tomorrow, society would severely suffer as a consequence. There are many volunteers who devote more time and enthusiasm to their volunteer activities than ever they do, or did, to the drudgery of their paid employment. This seems particularly the case for those who are officially retired.

The claim that socialism won’t succeed, because it relies on the great majority working cooperatively and voluntarily without financial incentives, is contradicted by the evidence. It is happening now, even though the dominant ethos is all about money. If the social, economic and political context was socialism, having been actively achieved by the vast majority, then what might now be termed altruism would actually be the norm. Very different to how things are presently arranged.

Council services

The borough in which the ensemble operates has recently issued its council tax requirements for the coming financial year. The rate has risen again, to a chorus of much grumbling. There is also a breakdown of the council’s spending. Two major items of expenditure are social care and children’s services. In the jargon these are ‘big ticket’ items. The problem is they become ever more expensive year on year. Social care has become a huge fiscal responsibility because many more people are failing to die in their seventies as was the case until fairly recently. Medical science and technology has advanced markedly, while working in the unhealthy atmospheres of heavy industry has declined, along with smoking,

What should be a cause of widespread celebration is marred by the cost. That science and technology comes at a price, as does the residential and home care for those requiring it. Families opening their council tax bills see the increase as putting further strain on stretched household budgets.

While the council is working under legal obligations to provide these services, a sense of responsibility also motivates councillors to do their best for those with needs. As Labour councillors they may well consider themselves socialists in this context. Theirs is a ‘socialism’ trying to mitigate the worst consequences of capitalism. Social care, for example, to look after elderly workers past the stage of being exploitable labour. In previous times it would have been the workhouse. The workhouse system was developed, at least in part, as a response to perceived rising costs on the parish rates of poor relief, such as the Speenhamland system. Council tax is the modern equivalent of the parish rates and is equally a matter of contention amongst those who must pay.

The bottom line, as it is often called these days, determines how needs are met. Whether it’s being involved in an ensemble, or some similar group, or looking after the elderly or children, the fundamental factor is money. No matter the political perspective, left, right or centre, debates and discussions revolve around the sums of money involved. For some such as the ensemble the decisions are collective ones, made by the whole group.

With public finance, local or national, the arbiter is the law. The price, paid by those who are dependent on what is described as the public purse, is rationing. If a need cannot be met due to there being insufficient funds to pay for it, then it will remain unmet. Even if provision is made it may not be sufficient or of suitable quality. Even in a social, and sociable, organisation such as the ensemble, a change in financial circumstances amongst those who pay may result in the withdrawal of concessions for those who can’t, albeit with heartfelt regret.

Socialism requires the maxim – from each according to ability, to each according to need – to be fully realised for everyone. This can only occur in a society in which the profit motive no longer operates and there are no prices for anything, money having become redundant. Until then, the Labour – and all too common – misunderstanding of socialism will continue to equate it with forms of charity, whether voluntary or legally enforced.

D. A.

A feeble criticism of Marx (1948)

From the January 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

Modern criticism of Marx tends to crystalise itself into the concession that Marx discovered but unfortunately over-emphasised certain important truths about the nature of social development. Thus do his capitalist critics damn him with a faint praise. Mr. Christopher Hollis, broadcasting “On the Merits and Defects of Karl Marx” (Listener, 4/9/47) offered a slight variation of the theme by at least appearing to praise him with rather more than faint damns. Apart from that his treatment of Marx has no further claim to originality.

Marx himself, sensitive to the fact that his analysis of existing social forms demanded some insight, into his historical method, presupposed in the preface, to “Capital,” people who were willing to learn something new and therefore think for themselves. Viewing his motley crowd of critics by and large, might suggest that this presupposition erred on the side of over-optimism. Indeed many of Marx’s critics have resolutely refused to take him neat. Instead they have preferred to swallow him heavily diluted with secondhand versions and hear-say of others. The sharpness and flexibility of Marx’s method must, however, be judged by the way Marx himself used it. The fact that certain people have criticised Marx without troubling to discover what can be learned from Marx himself has not prevented them from offering their own versions “of what Marx really meant” or should have meant. It did not, of course, prevent Mr. Hollis.

Calling Marx’s Historical Materialism crude economic determinism he nevertheless conceded that economic circumstances have a great influence on men’s views and conduct. “It is a naive and adolescent crudity that they are the sole influence,” he added. It is more naively adolescent for Mr. Hollis to attempt to foist on Marx a view he never held and the fallacy of which he himself exposed. Education, philosophy, religion, law, and political struggles, as Marx revealed, in their action and reaction on each other, played an important part by in turn modifying and influencing the main trend of economic development. What Marx did say was that the key to the whole social picture was to be found in the economic relations under which men live, for it is this which constitutes the most important influence over men’s lives and through their lives their ideas, institutions, and general cultural activities.

For Marx all social development is historically conditioned. That men make history is central then to his doctrine. Not out of any old circumstances it is true but out of the material conditions they find to hand ; again for Marx the vital difference between a colony of bees, or an organisation of ants lies in the fact that men’s historically determined social behaviour is consciously formulated for given purposes and directed towards given ends. Mr. Hollis could even learn that Marx’s theory of Historical Materialism is not only a way of understanding history but through that understanding a way of helping to make it.

According to Mr. Hollis Marx’s economic determinism merely formulated the fact that human nature had been predominantly ruled by greed throughout history. To expect human nature to change, except by the most gradual evolution, was from the standpoint of Marx’s own logic and materialistic thesis, utterly irrational. Socialism being ruled by a spirit of love and service was therefore impossible. Capitalism may pass, said Mr. Hollis, indeed it is reasonable to think so, but on the day of its overthrow the new Socialists and Communists speaking the language of the classless society will establish themselves as a new governing class.

Marx’s belief in the coming of Socialism, was, according to Mr. Hollis, the rewriting of his ancient Jewish ancestral creed, Marx being the son of a Jew who became baptised in the Christian faith, Marx himself the inheritor of generations of Jewish faith translated the coming of the Lord in terms of the coming Communist revolution. Other “psychologists” have also explained Marx’s theories in terms of personal motivation. With that delightful lack of agreement and refreshing inconsistency which characterises “the finding” of these mind experts they have arrived at different conclusions to those of Mr. Hollis. Thus Marx’s theories of social revolution have been rationalised, as a desire to be revenged on his father for turning a Christian; the result of an ineradicable inferiority complex ; and even as a bye-product of an unhealthy liver. Doubtless a perverse ingenuity could think up a, dozen more reasons equally good—or bad. We for our part confess our utter inability to attempt an objective assessment of a many ideas in terms of subjective personal motivation. Generally speaking, such is the vast range of human motives that they are mostly too complex and obscure for people themselves to be really clear about them. For us the only satisfactory criterion of a man’s ideas is whether it is a more, or less objective representation of the processes he seeks to explain. Mr. Hollis’ attempts to deal with Marx’s theories from this aspect were, however, singularly unsatisfactory.

Mr. Hollis even described Marxism among other things as a psychology. Although he added “there is no psychologist today who would accept Marxian Psychology.” He thought that in the realm of psychological motivation there was infinitely more truth in Adler’s lust of power theory than in Marx’s crude economic determinism. Not only Marx himself but also his theories are shifted by Mr. Hollis into the realm of “psychological motivation.” The results of Mr. Hollis’ efforts in so doing are sensational. For if we are to believe Mr. Hollis it is not Marx’s view that it is the historical development of social productive forces which put men’s social needs and economic interests in a definite social cast but rather it is certain fixed and inflexible psychological attributes which bring about the social superstructure necessary for their expression. Mr. Hollis, with a wave of his psychological wand, is thus able to turn Marx the materialist into Marx the idealist. For Marx, if we are to believe Mr. Hollis, merely regarded historic social changes as but the derivative and outcome of a state of mind, albeit a greedy state of mind. Social productive relations are not then the prior and indispensible conditions for men’s existence but some ghostly process tacked on as it were to their immutable economic behaviour. All of which leads to the inescapable conclusion that Marxism is but the affirmation of the subjectivist claim that nothing exists but thinking makes it so. Mr. Hollis is probably unaware of the fact that it was Marx who with objective criticism and scientific acumen scourged those idealistic thinkers, such as Stirner, Bentham, etc., who held such notions! Incidentally, although innocently, Marx also scourged the idealistic Mr. Hollis.

Marx, however, denied that men’s economic interests and needs were to be found by an abstract psychological study of men’s minds; any more than they can be found in a physiological study of their bodies. Such interests are not psychologically derived but socially conditioned. More specifically, men’s social interests and economic exigencies have their origin not in the consciousness or unconsciousness of individuals but in the role these individuals play as members of a social group or class, in the organisation of production. Whether a man is born into that social group which makes him slave owner or slave, feudal lord or serf, employer or wage earner, depends not on his good or bad intent but on a set of productive relations indispensable to his existence and independent of his will. A mode of production based then on private property relationships, expresses the way different classes stand to each other in the division of wealth and the manner and extent in which the total social product is divided between them. In a society such as Capitalism the continued social well-being of the class who own the means of wealth production is dependent on the exploited class who are non-owners. It is true that hero and there an individual succeeds in changing his independent status, but for the overwhelming majority of the dependent class their social and economic conditions are given. Consequently their position of social servitude cannot be changed without revolutionising the productive relationships which make this servitude indispensable for the exploiters The interests of an individual are then but the expression of the common interests of his class. Whatever incidental differences may arise between members of the same social group they are subordinated and subservient to those common benefits that serve their class needs.

In the same way the conflict of class interests is never a conflict which originates and centres around abstractions like “human greed” and “lust for power.” These class conflicts themselves have their objective source in the antagonistic character of social relations based on class ownership of the means of living. The solution for the resolving of these class conflicts likewise is not the outcome of arbitrary choice or ethical preference. On the contrary it is the conscious realisation of concrete class needs made possible by the objective opportunities provided by the development of the social forces within present day society. For it is only when social production is freed from the restraint of private ownership which gives power over the lives of the many and hampers their- free development can a state of affairs—common ownership of the means of living—provide the social basis on which “the free development of each individual is the condition for the free development of all.” Which shows how much or how little Mr. Hollis understood of the subject he so kindly undertook to explain.

Nevertheless, Mr. Hollis assured his listeners that Capitalism was passing away. While Mr. Hollis was reticent about the shape of things to come he was at least emphatic that the shape would not be Socialism. Sombrely his political horoscope pointed instead to the emergence of a new ruling class. From his statement that the new Society was in its birth pangs we may deduce the fact that the exploited section will continue to be the working class. The economic function of the working class is, of course, to produce surplus value, i.e. the difference in value over and above the cost of their own subsistence and the value of the total product they produce. The appropriators will then be Mr. Hollis’ “new ruling class” who will monopolise the means of living. But it is this method of exploitation based upon the conversion of the dispossessed labourers’ working energies into a commodity and a section who appropriate their unpaid labour which is the starting point and distinctive feature of Capitalism as an historic mode of production. Nothing in essentials will be changed in Mr. Hollis’ “new society.” For a new ruling class to come into existence it must presuppose an entirely new set of economic conditions having entirely different social aims and economic objectives. To call managers, functionaries, bureaucrats, etc., operating and monopolising the means of production under the aegis of the State, a new ruling class is a misnomer. As appropriators of surplus value they would merely be fulfilling the same economic function as the entrepreneur and private corporations they had replaced. The method of exploitation would still exist in the form of capital and wealth accumulation ; or more strictly capital accumulation by the process of seeking, as far as possible, the expansion of surplus value, would be the dominant economic aim and objective. What distinguishes a ruling class is not a particular set of personalities who make up its ranks but the particular way a ruling class, by ownership of wealth resources, appropriates the labour of others. Mr. Hollis’ new ruling class would then be merely different individuals of the old ruling class. In the same way as the former Nazi leaders by forced purchases, appropriation and penetration into large scale industry did not, as some have fondly imagined, form the, nucleus of a new ruling class, but as recipients of surplus value, became part of the German Capitalist class.

It is also an illusion held by Burnham and other supporters of the so-called “managerial revolution” that State intervention weakens and finally destroys the basis of Capitalism. What, in actual fact, does happen is that with the monopolistic growth of modern Capitalism the political functions of the State become more and more integrated into the economic functions of capital. The purpose of political controls is then to ensure as far as possible the smooth running of the various branches of Capitalist production ; the easing of the friction between various sections of the Capitalist class; and the regularising and spreading over of some part of the capital resources of the ruling class in the main field of Capitalist production. State intervention, so far from weakening Capitalism, attempts to strengthen and preserve it in the interests of the Capitalist class as a whole. Even where a considerable measure of State control of industry has been carried out it merely means that the appropriation of surplus value is carried out by the State on behalf of collectivised capital. That is why Mr. Burnham, in his desperate attempt to find a new economic basis for his Managerial Society, merely discovered the novelty of another name for a form of highly developed State Capitalism.

Mr. Hollis also tried to foist on Marx an economic breakdown theory. He said Marx held that only by loans to undeveloped countries was Capitalism able to stave off the breakdown due to its inability to generate sufficient purchasing power ; finally, however, collapse would come. Nowhere did Marx put forward such a doctrine.

Mr. Hollis also thought that the increase of the wealth of the poor was a denial of Marx’s forecast about the development of Capitalism. To talk of the increase of the wealth of the poor is a comical phrase, like talking about the increased health of the permanently diseased. He argued that the worker’s standard of living has increased incomparably more than in all previous recorded history. Yet, strangely enough, never, perhaps, has history recorded such vast inequalities of income on the scale obtaining in Capitalism. What is true is that in spite of the incomparable increase in producing wealth in ever vaster quantities the poverty of the great majority in Capitalism is not merely a logical deduction from Marx’s theories but a physical and social fact.

Mr. Hollis complained that the taxation of the rich was becoming increasingly heavier. One can only say that a system of society, such as the present, where the State is compelled to spend vast resources on the upkeep of such things as armies, navies and armaments in general, can hardly constitute a satisfactory defence of capitalism. If anything it is another excellent reason why Capitalism should go.

That Mr. Hollis should read into what he calls the logic of Marx his own crudely naive and adolescent fatalism of a world in the grip of iron laws based on human greed is lamentable. What is perhaps more lamentable is that it should obtain licence to be performed publicly. Doubtless, however, the traditional “B.B.C. impartiality” is best preserved by letting its listeners hear Marx explained by non-Marxists or even anti-Marxists.

In conclusion we may add that from Mr. Hollis’ discourse on Marx we failed to discern either “the merits or defects of Karl Marx.” We did, however, in this respect discover the defects of Mr. Hollis.

Ted Wilmott

Socialism & the State. (1910)

From the December 1910 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist propagandist is often confronted with the assertion that the establishment of a system of Socialism would involve the subjection of the individual to a hide-bound State, that would eventually result in the enslavement of the people. 

The Socialist, on the contrary, asserts that the working class are enslaved to-day, and that only the establishment of Socialism can effect their emancipation.

The individualist attacks Socialism from the standpoint that the proposed change simply means the continuation of the present wage-system of production, in which the whole of the wealth of society shall be owned by a number of persons incorporated into a State or bureaucracy, instead of being, as at present, owned by private individuals. He maintains that the right of the individual is supreme, and condemns any action on the part of a State or collection of individuals, that interferes with his desires.

Since correct understanding implies correct interpretation of terms used, and the point revolves upon the meaning of the term “slave”, I will preface my remarks with such a definition. 

A slave is one who is owned by or controlled by another; one who is compelled to labour to satisfy the wants of another. 

The chattel-slave originally was a prisoner of war, whose life was at the disposal of his owner. He was allowed to live in order that he might produce more wealth, or greater satisfaction, for his owner, than could be obtained from his death, his owner, of course, providing him with the food, clothing and shelter necessary to keep him in a fit condition.

Later on in the development of society we find the serf, who was compelled to labour for a certain period for his lord, the remainder of his time being at his own disposal for the purpose of providing himself and his family with the necessaries of life.

To-day the worker, in order to live, is compelled to labour for a certain period. He receives, however, but a portion of the wealth created. Out of the wealth he has produced he receives (according to Mr. Chiozza Money [who estimates the wealth produced at £4. 5s. per week per family of five, while the average amount received by a working class family of five is shown to be 25s . per week] and other capitalist statisticians) about one-third. That is to say that if he produces goods to the value of £3, he receives as a wage £1, his master taking the remainder.

While there may be a difference in degree in those different forms of exploitation, the principle still remains. The under-dog is compelled to labour for the purpose of producing something to satisfy the wants of others who, holding the things necessary for his life, thereby control him. He is, therefore, still a slave.

The principle would remain if the working class was compelled to work for a State instead of for individual employers. If the whole of the wealth and the means of production are owned by a State and the worker receives a wage, then slavery is not abolished, but is intensified.

The worker to-day, while compelled to work for a master, still has some sort of a choice among those masters, but with the State as the only employer he is compelled to work for that employer and under that employer’s conditions, or take the only alternative and starve. State Capitalism would intensify slavery, but State Capitalism is not Socialism.

Our individualist opponent, if a toiler, is subject to others. Others have the power to say when he shall work and when he shall starve, how he shall work and under what conditions. His life and action are determined largely by his spending capacity; by the extent of his wage. He cannot do as he would wish because he is bound to the bench or to the counter. The greater part of his life is occupied by laborious toil or petty business – toil and worry and anxiety in the interest of others. He is robbed by the capitalist employer and oppressed by the capitalist State.

And what is this State? Merely representative of the dominant class; the class in power, whose interest lies in an opposite direction to the interest of the workers. 

The State is merely the force that enables the working class to subject the working class.

Large  bodies of drilled and armed men are only necessary where the greater number of the people are subject to the few, and those civil and military forces necessary to control the oppressed and exploited class are the “State”.

The State grew up at a certain stage of economic development with the growth of classes, and when the classes are abolished the State will go too. Socialism means no State.

The propertyless have no “rights” under capitalism — not even the right to live. Far from being in any way free they are the property, to all intents and purposes, of the propertied class. Our opponents have been misled by the so-called friends of the worker — the municipal-cum-nationaliser — by the pet theory of the Fabian, who holds that the “government of the future must be by experts”, with the Fabians, of course, as the experts.

Those who read of the conditions of the people of Peru, prior to its conquest by the Spaniards, will find therein many points of resemblance to the proposed bureaucracy of the Fabians.

The Peruvian State was not capitalism: goods being produced, not for sale, but for consumption by the people. Take the following from Prescott (p. 56):

“The Peruvian Government watched with unwearied solicitude over its subjects, provided for their physical necessities, was mindful of their morals, and showed throughout the affectionate concern of a parent for his children, who were never to act or think for themselves, but whose whole duty was comprehended in the obligation of implicit obedience”.

And on page 26 we are told “Industry was publicly commended and stimulated by rewards”.

Compare this with the following from Fabian Essays (1908 edition) under the heading of “Socialism and the State” (p. 163).

“Out of the value of the communal produce must come, rent of land payable to the local authority, rent of plant needed for working the industries, wages advanced and fixed in the usual way, taxes, reserve fund, accumulation fund, and the other charges necessary for the carrying on of the communal business. All these deducted, the remaining value should be divided among the communal workers as a bonus . . . 

"If there is one vice more than another that will be unpopular under Socialism it is laziness.”

In Peru, we are told (Prescott, p. 26) “Occupation was found for all, from the child of five to the aged matron not too infirm to hold a distaff, no one was allowed to eat the bread of idleness in Peru”.

Well may working-men who have studied the conditions of present-day capitalism resent the proposals of the “State Socialist” with his grandmotherly legislative enactments. Such a change as is proposed by him would indeed mean slavery, and would throw the propertyless class still deeper in the mire of social degradation.

The Government of the Incas was in spirit truly patriarchal since “the task imposed upon him was always proportioned to his strength, he had seasons of rest and refreshment and was well protected against the inclemency of the weather”, and “every care was shown for his personal safety”. Yet the greater number of people in Peru were slaves, and slaves of such a type that the conditions of to-day are preferable to those who, recognising the evils of wage-slavery under which they exist, are trying to find a way out. True the people were kept in subjection by the superstition that the Inca was a supreme being, a descendant of the sun, and they blindly worshipped him as omnipotent. They were prepared to toil for his benefit and for the benefit of his nobles.

But is the superstition of the Fabian worshipper in any way preferable? To blindly worship the State and toil to support the supposed experts in control (for we are told [Fabian Essays, p. 164] that it is probable that the “captains of Industry will be more highly paid than the rank and file of the industrial army”) is as great an error, as foolish a superstition, as to worship the sun and its supposed descendants.

The worker must be forced to realise that to effect his emancipation he must discard  all superstition and must refuse to be led and bossed by self-styled “superior persons”. He must understand that in order to obtain the best of things necessary for life, with the least expenditure of energy he must organise with his fellows.

Individual production is played out. Without doubt the best results are to be obtained by social production. All the evil is caused by that co-operation ending with production, and the wealth, socially produced, being owned by a small section of the community. We cannot go back to individual production, nor is it desirable. What must ultimately come is a system wherein wealth shall be socially produced and collectively owned by the producers, who shall say in what way and in what quantity it shall be produced.

In brief, the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth must be owned and controlled by the whole working community.

Twel.

Letter: Socialism's Economics (1977)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism's Economics

The article on socialism in September’s SS (p. 166-7) went beyond the evidence on human desires in the hypothetical new society. But it clearly declared that many wants may have to go unsatisfied. It did not indicate how such decisions would be reached. It pointed out that Socialism would be similar to capitalism in being a system of co-operation and social production, but it did not show what we could put in place of the price system as a means of economic communication. People would have to work, but how would they know when enough is enough? In short, where is the socialist economics that will make an economy based on common ownership viable?

“RAW" tells us (1) that it must be technically possible to keep people free of deprivation and (2) people need to have socialist understanding. He tells us that the first requirement has been met even though people like the Hyde Park questioner may feel deprived. The second is a different matter. Capitalism did not have to solve this, RAW says. Perhaps he thinks the knowledge that even children have mastered to buy sweets should not count as knowledge. On this I do not agree. However, what about the knowledge we will use to economize our wants in the new society? This seems to have been ignored by RAW.

Workers are only “forced” to work in capitalism because they want to live. The same “force" would exist in any society that depended upon effort to supply needs. The two obstacles facing the SPGB are different from the ones RAW mentioned. They are: (1) A viable socialist economics that would theoretically expound the new society as modern economics expounds capitalism. (2) A political theory of how to manage law and order in the new society. I think it is fair to say that while they remain unsolved Socialism remains a half-baked idea.

David McDonagh 

Birmingham

Reply:

We are afraid that the trouble is that like many people, you feel that a harmonious system like Socialism is really too good to be true and therefore spend your time looking for all possible faults (which is fine) but find problems which won’t exist (which is unnecessary). You bring up the old difficulty: "What if everyone wants a Rolls Royce etc? Chaos must reign!” Under capitalism though, most people know they will never even ride in a Rolls, let alone own one, so that’s fine! The rich who rule the earth, can drive the Rolls Royces, and the people who build them can wait for the bus, and so that's fine! What you don’t grasp is that we will only have Socialism when the majority of people are socialists; that is people who know what Socialism is, and are determined to get it. Such people will not wreck Socialism because society may not be able to afford to produce Rolls Royces. The “economics” that you seem to require is in part a result of looking at the future. Socialism, with the conditioned eyes of the present, capitalism. Socialists who go through the revolutionary process of establishing Socialism will work in their own interests sorting out their material requirements. It may sound simple, but it is not only the SPGB that says it is possible to solve all the material problems i.e. it is technically possible to do so. It is only socialists though who have suggested the practical way of doing so. Why not spend your time thinking about the real problems that afflict us now, and not the imagined ones of the future? And join with us in getting rid of the cause of these problems?

So far as your question of law and order is concerned, there is not space to go into that here. We would refer you in particular to The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Engels, which shows that law is a product (and therefore a problem) of property society, and will be of no relevance to property less society, i.e. Socialism.

Editors.

Violence and war: Are they inevitable? The long view (2025)

From the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard 

 

It’s become widely accepted that, for well over 200,000 years, hunter-gatherers, humans like us, lived in egalitarian societies. So why, beginning around 12,000 years ago, did most of them, within a relatively short period of time, give up that lifestyle for settled agriculture and, in so doing, move to a different way of life and new social structures, where a dominance hierarchy of the few began to take over from equality for all, leading to exploitation, slavery, violence and war?

The invention of scarcity

The answer to that is multi-faceted. But, broadly speaking, such a transformation can only have come about as a result of environmental factors pushing people into the imagined greater security that the longer-term and more abundant supplies of food and other materials derived from farming would have been capable of producing. The trouble is that, once that happened, there was no obvious going back, as it brought with it the creation of hierarchies and states and rule by those few who in previous societies would have been considered anti-social for their dominating tendencies. That minority would now have much freer rein for their deviant behaviour, resulting in struggles for power, the development of classes and rulers and ruled, and the emergence of what came to be considered natural orders headed by kings, emperors, pharaohs and high priests, with the majority living at a lower level of subsistence than as hunter-gatherers (‘the invention of scarcity’, it has been called). This in turn gave rise to full-scale predatory social systems (first slavery, then feudalism, and now capitalism) where the majority have been kept in check by tiny, privileged minorities either by the threat of violence from higher authority and/or by ideological constructs or smokescreens such as tribal loyalty or nationalism.

Original sin and the free market

In the lens of recorded history the result of these dominance structures and of the conflicts over wealth and resources that have arisen between the privileged ruling minorities has been (and still is) large-scale violence and continual wars. And over most of this history, the explanation for this found in writings, both secular and religious, has been that conflict between humans is the natural state of things. Christianity, for example, expressed this through the idea of ‘original sin’, while commentators not dependent on religious doctrine tended to come to similar conclusions. For example, the 16th century Italian political writer Machiavelli, in his famous essay The Prince, stated that human beings were ‘ungrateful, fickle, dissembling, hypocritical, cowardly and greedy’ and ‘never do anything good except out of necessity’. Similar views were expressed in the following century by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan, which argued that human beings are greedy by nature and that human life is ‘a condition of war of all against all’. The following century, the economist Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations, also famously insisted that private interest (or ‘self-love’) was ‘natural’ human behaviour, justifying a society based on the ‘free market’, where everyone seeks their own self-advantage regardless of the social and economic inequality that goes with it. Some questioning of these views did begin in the 19th century with the writings of Charles Darwin and early practitioners of the science of anthropology such as Lewis Henry Morgan. But it was only in the 20th century, with the increased flowering of anthropology and the new science of archaeology, that serious doubt was cast on the belief that human beings were deep-down selfish, wicked and aggressive, as new perspectives emerged from growing evidence of how people had lived and interacted in the pre-farming era, the overwhelmingly longest period of human existence on earth.

Not that the traditional ‘fixed human nature’ view simply went away. It continued to be expressed in much popular writing in particular. Examples of this between the 1950s and the 1970s were books like Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape, Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression, Robert Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative, and imaginative fiction like William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (and arguably George Orwell’s Animal Farm too). It also carried on coming from some ‘scientific’ sources, for example Richard Wrangham’s 1996 book Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence and, most recently, Richard Overy in Why War (2024). Such writers tend to see war as having been constant throughout the whole of human history, suggesting that humans are war prone and have what Overy calls ‘a psychological predisposition for warfare’. And this leads that writer to conclude that ‘if war has a very long human history, it also has a future’.

But, overall, the last 30-40 years have marked a significant shift in perspectives both among social commentators and scientific experts. Among a slew of studies on this and allied topics (some of them reviewed in this journal), titles like Beyond War, The Human Potential for Peace, Team Human, Survival of the Friendliest, and Ultra-Social tell their own tale. The majority of these writings conclude from their authors’ investigations not that human beings are non-violent and non-prone to war per se but rather that violence and fighting are not their most natural inclination, even if they are capable of being driven to it by circumstances. Even the widely read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, though often cited as supporting the idea of innate human selfishness, on close examination does no such thing. In fact it is largely a book about altruism and cooperative behaviour. Even its writer is on record as saying that its title may have been an unfortunate one and that perhaps a different title such as ‘The Immortal Gene’, or even ‘The Altruistic Organism’, might have been more appropriate.

Highly flexible or pro-social?

Highly relevant in this connection too is the work of anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson, who has spent 50 years researching the origins of war and has been called ‘the greatest living scholar of human warfare’. In an article in Scientific American in 2018, entitled ‘War is not part of human nature’, Ferguson notes that the overwhelming evidence on war, which he defines as armed conflict and killing sanctioned by society and carried out by members of one group against members of another group, suggests that it was not always present among humans. Instead it began as a result of societal changes at varying times in different locations but with its earliest signs appearing around 12,000 years ago – so closely coinciding with humankind’s first experiments with agriculture. In a later article (2023) in the journal Public Anthropologist, he states: ‘Our species is not biologically destined for war. War is not an inescapable part of social existence’; and ‘Obviously, we are capable of war and often choose it. The question is whether evolution tilts us in that direction. I say no.’ His findings, he says, show that: ‘egalitarian mobile hunter foragers generally don’t make war’ and that ‘agriculture and states went along with more war’. His most recent book, Chimpanzees, War, and History: Are Men Born to Kill? (2023) reiterates this with the conclusion that ‘Men are not born to kill but they can be cultivated to kill’.

This is a perspective also echoed by Yuval Noah Harari in his best-selling book Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind (2014). Here Harari makes a clear statement about humans as essentially flexible creatures, insisting that human behaviour is shaped by the society into which we are born and become part of. He goes on to say that, if our social arrangements were determined simply by our biology, then there would never have been the wide gamut of behaviour patterns, relationships and cultures which we know about and which can also be witnessed in what we see around us now.

Some studies go even further than this, seeing humans as naturally ‘pro-social’ beings with cooperation not competition, peacefulness not violence as their intrinsic default. In such studies, qualities such as kindness and empathy are seen as existing ‘naturally’ in the overwhelming majority of humans, as long as overwhelming forces don’t get in the way of it. The historian Tine De Moor, for example, in The Dilemma of the Commoners (2015), claims that ‘history teaches us that man is essentially a cooperative being, a homo cooperans’, that ‘human beings claim togetherness and interaction’ and that ‘our spirits yearn for connection just as our bodies hunger for food’. This kind of outlook is echoed by Rutger Bregman in his book Humankind. A Hopeful History (2021) in which he presents arguments many have found compelling that the innate, fundamental default of human beings is to be friendly, communal and cooperative and that the outstanding feature of human behaviour is the desire to act together and to display tolerance and mutual support even if circumstances are dire. As part of the evidence for this he points to the plethora of everyday gestures of help, cooperation, solidarity and compassion people in all societies all over the world show to one another on a daily basis without any prospect of gain or reward. John Gowdy’s Ultra Social. The Evolution of Human Nature and the Quest for a Sustainable Future (2021), though in most ways a quite different kind of book from Bregman’s, echoes a similar message with statements like ‘Our current predicaments are not gene-based. They have risen out of the material base of human economies and the associated cultural adaptations and supporting institutions’ and with an insistence that, if we have a ‘nature’, it is a ‘pro-social’ one, a natural inclination, to be empathetic, associative and cooperative.

Such considerations about human behaviour have been accompanied – and often confirmed – by the more detailed and scientific studies of primeval hunter-gatherer societies that modern technological methods have made possible. A recent study, for example, analysing evidence of traumatic injuries in 189 individuals from 25 different sites revealed healed bone treatment, suggesting a story of mutual aid, patience and dedication among those people (Victoria Romano and others, ‘Bone trauma and interpersonal care among Late Holocene hunter-gatherers from Patagonia, Argentina’, International Journal of Paleopathology, December 2025, pp.10-24). It has been estimated that around one in five hunter-gatherers would have been likely to suffer some kind of injury or disability and while most wounds would have been the predictable bruises and fractures of daily life requiring only a short break from everyday activities, others were likely to have been worse, leaving individuals unable to hunt, gather, grind plants, craft tools, etc, for months, or perhaps a lifetime. Here we are presented with evidence that those suffering in this way would have been cared for by the community, even if they were not economically ‘useful’. Such research, therefore, lends weight to the ‘pro-social’ arguments many are making about a fundamentally benign human nature.

But in the end, whether humans are intrinsically ‘pro-social’ or simply highly flexible, the evidence is that, while violence and war are certainly possible forms of human behaviour as both history and the present show, coexistence without violence or war also presents itself as another possible form of human behaviour. This was a reality recognised as far back as 1985 in Unesco’s ‘Seville Statement on Violence’, in the following terms: ‘Biology does not condemn humanity to war … It is scientifically incorrect to say that war or any other violent behaviour is genetically programmed into our human nature’. And the undeniable fact is that the vast majority of interactions that take place in daily life between human beings are co-operative, peaceful and harmonious, not rude or cruel or anti-social. We do not normally expect to have arguments or experience serious friction with our fellow humans in the course of our daily activities, and most of the time we don’t. And, on the relatively rare occasions when that does happens, it stands out – precisely because it is rare.

Cooperation or competition?

The broader point here is that, while we do not say that the kind of society socialists advocate and regard as eminently possible will be entirely argument or conflict free (no human society could be), we do say that the scope for argument and conflict will be far less than in the competitive, insecure society we live in under capitalism. This society, in both its ethic and its organisation, runs directly contrary to the ‘normal’ human tendency to help and cooperate with others. It drives people to compete with others, to try to get the better of them and even to do them down. It does this by tempting people with the lure of gain or reward, often financial, so pushing them to behave in ways that divide them from their fellow humans and often making the ‘success’ of one into the ‘failure’ of others. Given this reality, what is truly remarkable and significant is that, despite the overwhelmingly powerful pressures capitalism places on people to get the better of others and so not be ‘kind’ to them, in so many of the actions and connections and competitive situations created for us in our daily lives, most of us still manage to be largely kind to others, to cooperate with them and to share. In a new kind of egalitarian society, one of free and equal access, with no buying and selling or wages or salaries, with co-operative endeavour, and with technology and the abundant resources of the planet used to satisfy need and not for profit-making ends, is it far-fetched to believe that such behaviour will come fully into its own?

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

Books mentioned in the article that have featured elsewhere in previous Socialist Standards

• Sep 1969: A review of The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris.
• Aug 1993: A review of Lord of the Flies by William Golding.
• Nov 2015: A review of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.
• May 2021: A review of Humankind. A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
• Sep 2022: A review of Ultrasocial. The Evolution of Human Nature and the Quest for a Sustainable Future by John Gowdy

Co-operation makes sense (1986)

From the November 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Are you a sucker? Do you cheat? Or are you one to bear a grudge? For biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene (1978). such questions impinge on a subject of great importance: what is the most effective behavioural strategy to ensure survival in evolutionary terms?

By the title of his book, it seems that, for Dawkins, this was a foregone conclusion — that natural selection would tend to favour, above all. behaviour that was nasty and ruthlessly competitive. As he says himself: 

The selfish gene view follows logically from the accepted assumptions of neo-Darwinism. It is easy to misunderstand but, once understood, it is hard to doubt its fundamental truth. Most of the organisms that have ever lived failed to become ancestors. We that exist are, without exception, descended from that minority within every earlier generation that were successful in becoming ancestors. Since all we animals inherit our genes from ancestors rather than from non-ancestors, we tend to possess the qualities that make for success in becoming an ancestor rather than the qualities that make for failure. Successful qualities are such things as fleetness of foot, sharpness of eye. perfection of camouflage, and there seems no getting away from it ruthless selfishness. Nice guys don't become ancestors. Therefore living organisms don't inherit the qualities of nice guys (The Listener, 17 April 1986).

Yet Dawkins is at pains to disassociate himself from the rather pessimistic implications of such views for society. Interestingly, in the Horizon programme on television (on which the above article is based) called Nice Guys Finish First he related how, after the publication of his book, he was wooed by various people of right wing persuasion who saw his book as a vindication of their belief in a system of cut-throat competition. Conversely. he found himself under attack from the left, one critic going so far as to suggest that the impact of The Selfish Gene was partly to blame for the subsequent election of the Thatcher government.

But Dawkins insists that both sides had misunderstood the point he was trying to make. Paradoxically, the pursuit of self interest is not necessarily incompatible with being "nice" — that is, co-operative. This is what is confusingly referred to in socio-biological circles as "reciprocal altruism". Since altruism implies the genuinely intended sacrifice of one's interests, it is difficult to see how this fits in with the idea conveyed by the term "reciprocal altruism", that if you scratch my back I will scratch yours and both will benefit as a result. It would be more accurate to call this "enlightened self interest": no "sacrifice" is involved.

Nevertheless, to show how this might operate. Dawkins refers to game theory — in particular a game called The Prisoner's Dilemma:

In the simplest version of this game, two players have each to choose between two moves. Co-operate and Defect (hereafter C and D). Unlike in chess or ping pong, the players don't move alternately but simultaneously, in ignorance of the other's simultaneous move. If you and I both play C we get more (say £3) than if we both play D (say £2). If one of us plays C and simultaneously the other plays D. the D player gets the highest possible score (say £4) and the C player gets the "sucker's payoff" (say £1). So. from my point of view, the best outcome is that I play D and you play C. But if I calculate this, and play D accordingly, you are just as capable of working out the same thing and playing D yourself In this case we both only get the low payoff. If only we'd both played C. we'd both have got the comparatively high payoff of £3. But, if I work this out and play C you do even better if you choose D. Therefore, rational players will always play D and will always obtain the low payoff of £2. But — here is the paradox and maddening dilemma — each rational player simultaneously knows that, if only he and his opponent could somehow manage to enter into a binding contract to play C. both would do better (ibid).

Here Dawkins provides an example of how this situation could arise in real life. Take a group of friends who like to eat out at a restaurant and split the cost of the meal equally between them. There will always be the temptation for any one of them to order a little more than the others, knowing that the extra cost will be equally shared. Conversely, any one of them will realise that if they do not order as much as the others they will be subsidising their friends. Therefore, there will be a built-in tendency for each of them to order as much as they can get away with.

The worst that can happen in such a situation is that some of them will benefit at the expense of the others and perhaps as a consequence they will fall out with each other. Come what may there will be both winners and losers. But it is possible to imagine a situation — even to point to real life examples such as the destruction of the herring industry through over-fishing in the early part of this century — in which this same competitive logic can result in everyone losing out.

In such a situation, no-one actually intends that as a consequence of each of them competing against one another they should eventually all lose out. Yet they are obliged, even in full knowledge of the fate that could await them, to continue with the very actions that will make that fate a reality.

This situation has been described by the American biologist, Garrett Hardin, as the Tragedy of the Commons (Science vol 162 13 December 1968). As he puts it:

The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.

As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximise his gain Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks "What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?" This utility has one negative and one positive component.

1. The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly +1.

2. The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of - 1

Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another . . But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit — in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination towards which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in the commons bring ruin to all.

Hardin's solution to this tragedy of the commons is "mutual coercion". An appeal to conscience, he argues, is altogether futile. Mutual coercion can be effected through, as it were, enclosing the commons and instituting a system of private property which will enforce a sense of responsibility among herdsmen as to the appropriate number of cattle their land can provide for without resulting in overgrazing. Since they cannot encroach on land owned by other herdsmen, the consequences of keeping too many cattle will be exclusively borne by them. This knowledge will therefore deter them from acting irresponsibly in the first place.

The problem here is that Hardin has quite obviously got hold of the wrong end of the stick. It is not the "inherent logic of the commons" which "remorselessly generates tragedy". The "commons" simply provides the setting in which this tragedy is played out. It does not embody the cause of the tragedy itself — that is, the overgrazing of the land by too many cattle.

That cause lies elsewhere, in the dynamism of competition which compels each herdsman to increase his herd beyond the carrying capacity of the land since his own livelihood is directly dependent on the number of cattle at his disposal. Had the cattle. like the land, been the communal possession of the herdsmen then it would have been possible to make a rational decision about the total number of cattle. In that case, the livelihood of each herdsman would be directly dependent on their collective wellbeing, which in turn would rest on securing an optimum ratio of cattle to land. As it was. each was obliged to make what was the only rational decision open to him within an irrational framework of decision-making, with inevitably tragic consequences. So much for the view expounded by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations that the individual who "intends only his own gain" is "led by an invisible hand to promote the public interest".

"In a reverse way", argues Hardin, "the tragedy of the commons re-appears in problems of pollution. Here it is not a question of taking something out of the commons but of putting something in". Just as in the case of the herdsman, a factory owner will be "locked into a system" that will ensure that the commons are treated as a convenient cesspool for the disposal of waste products. The owner will see that it will pay to avoid the costs of purifying the pollutants by simply dumping them in the environment because the saving this represents far exceeds the environmental cost the factory may have to bear though others bear it as well. Rational self interest will therefore demand pollution.

Following Hardin's suggestion let us assume that the commons have been enclosed. In theory, this would mean that anyone could prevent their neighbour from polluting their land just as the herdsmen could prevent their neighbour's cattle from straying onto their land. Anyone who chose not to purify their pollutants would be obliged to contain them within their own property and bear the total costs such pollution entailed. But what sounds fine in theory will prove quite unworkable in practice since what we mean by the "commons" embraces not just the land but the air and water surrounding us. These, as Hardin concedes, "cannot readily be fenced".

A simple example will make this clearer. Suppose my neighbour decided to build a factory alongside a stream into which were pumped the factory's effluents Suppose I delighted in fishing but now with all the fish killed I could no longer pursue my interest. What could I then do? I could of course purchase the right of ownership of that section of the stream that flowed past my back door but my neighbour, upstream of me. could do the same and argue plausibly for the right to use that section of the stream as they chose. Of course, the consequence of my neighbour's decision to site a factory on their property need not be confined to this. Its visual impact on the neighbourhood could depress the price of residential properties all around. The constant noise might disturb my sleep. The lorries carrying the raw materials it processed may congest the roads making commuting to work a hazardous slog.

If I were to grant my neighbour the absolute right to dispose of their property as they chose, it would be inconsistent of me to complain of the consequences. If, on the other hand, I sought to restrict the ways in which my neighbour could use their property then I would be asserting the need to retain the "commons" as an entity in one or other respect — the tranquillity of the neighbourhood or the right to fish in an unpolluted stream. We cannot live in a cocoon. Even capitalism itself, the most competitive and atomistic form of society that has ever evolved, cannot afford not to make some concession to this stark fact.

We see this in the way conventional thinking approaches the problem of pollution. Hardin himself points out that while (according to him), "our particular concept of private property deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth" it actually "favours pollution. The solution which he and many others suggest is the direct intervention of the state in the form of legislation to temper the excesses of competition committed by private citizens. "Mutual coercion", apparently, will not suffice.

The weaknesses in this approach are twofold. It does not strike at the root cause of the problem at the competitive advantage to be gained by minimising costs — in this case, the costs of purifying and disposing of pollutants in an ecologically acceptable manner — incurred by capitalist enterprises. It blandly assumes that the state is a more or less autonomous institution which presides over society and legislates in the interests of the whole community. But in fact the state is a class institution, financed through taxation by the very enterprises whose activities it seeks to regulate. Legislation is a matter of finely balancing the losses and gains that accrue to the capitalists themselves. Too lenient an approach might be politically unacceptable and excessively ruinous to the health of the workers who create the profits for the businesses that employ them. Too punitive an approach, on the other hand, can erode profit margins and drive investment into other parts of the world where regulations are more lax. And all the time, the dividing line between what is acceptable and what is not shifts as the economic climate itself changes: the more desperate the plight of business, the more lenient does the law become.

This brings us back to Richard Dawkins. What does he think is the way forward? Political scientists tend to see so much of life as a Prisoner's Dilemma. Many would argue that we therefore need to have some authority to take more of the decisions out of our hands — rather like the way the state supposedly denies the option to a capitalist enterprise to release its toxic wastes into the environment by declaring this illegal. But as we have seen things don't happen that way. The state, too. is enmeshed in the irrational framework that is capitalist competition.

Dawkins would set rather more store by the Law of the Jungle than the Law of the State as a model for encouraging co-operative behaviour. Suggesting that we have a lot to learn from the animal world around us, he gives the example of gulls which need to groom themselves in order to remove parasitic ticks. The difficulty arises in grooming their heads; which requires the co-operation of another gull. Gulls that cheated on other gulls would soon drive the suckers into extinction. But cheats themselves would eventually follow the suckers since there would be no gulls left willing to groom them.

What are the implications of this for society? Dawkins argues that we saw evidence of a tit-for-tat strategy developing in the trenches of the First World War. Soldiers would deliberately fire above the heads of their "enemies" to signal their desire to cooperate in minimising the mutual damage they could inflict upon one another. Their alleged enemies would respond in kind. Such was the extent to which the "disease of peace" took hold that after two years of this, the generals were eventually forced to completely re-write their battle plans turning instead to surprise tactics which served to destroy the unspoken trust that had been built up on both sides.

Though the insights that game theory has to offer are valuable, their possible application in the sort of society we have today — as the above example makes clear — is limited. We live in a world in which the means of living are monopolised by a small minority. Just as the hierarchical structure of an army invests a general with the power to command his troops so capitalist society itself can only ever be run in the interests of that capitalist minority. But the great majority of the population, the working people, whose interests are constantly thwarted by the dictates of capital, cannot do much to redress the balance within a social system which requires that we remain compelled to prostitute our working abilities for capitalist exploitation.

Real co-operation can only flourish on the foundations of social equality. Until then, for the great majority at least, we remain suckers with good reason to bear a grudge.

Robin Cox

Blogger's Note:

Yes, before you ask, that was the original accompanying picture for the article in the November 1986 issue of the Standard. Yes, I don't get it either. It's a still from the 1971 Ken Loach film, Family Life. The young woman in the picture is Sandy Ratcliff and the old bloke is Bill Dean. Both better known for being in soap operas in the 1980s. (EastEnders and Brookside.)